I have a mild obsession with home decor. Not that I actually go through with most of it, but man, I could spend hours pouring over Pottery Barn catalogs, Martha Stuart Living magazines and Pinterest (oh my god the ideas on Pinterest!). Now that we’re done with apartment living and finally in a house of our own, the obsession has grown 100 fold but our light blue master bedroom walls, for example, are still completely bare after almost half a year here. (yikes!)

You might know Minted.com for their beautiful & customizable cards, invitations and birth announcements. But did you know they also sell ornaments, garlands, table runners, day planners, personalizable photo backdrops and tons more? When Minted approached me to review their Art Marketplace, I took it as a sign it’s time to start getting serious about decorating my house.

But, I still wasn’t exactly sure what I wanted, so I let my kids go first and hoped for inspiration along the way. The kids previously had an ocean inspired theme to their bedroom, but as my daughter has recently developed an all-consuming obsession with bright orange (luckily we convinced her to go with just one wall instead of the whole room), the marine life doesn’t really fit as well as it once did. We picked an orange color filter (of course) at Minted.com/Art and scrolled through the limited edition prints. My daughter immediately began calling out favorites:

I also love that if you scroll down to the bottom of any page, Minted shows you a person holding the art in every size offered so you can see exactly how big your picture will be when it arrives. And, when you click on a frame, you can see how each picture will look in each specific frame. Some pictures even have a few different customizable color options like the Schooner design below. Although I do know what an 8×10 looks like, I found myself checking to see how the print looked every time – it was comforting and sometimes actually had me going bigger or smaller.

I’m still looking through all the options, but once I make my final decision and place my order, I’ll be sure to share with you what I think about these prints and frames in person. And if you’re looking for a great Christmas gift, there’s still time with 2 day or overnight shipping!

I absolutely love PicMonkey and use it constantly (as you’ve probably seen), so when they contacted me to help promote their Halloween photo contest, I said Yes! Yes! In exchange I got to play with the full features of their Royale premium membership.

Here’s the contest nitty gritty: PicMonkey is going to choose the most creative Halloween pictures in each of 3 categories: scary, cute, and funny. The 3 winners get a free year of Royale premium membership! To enter, just use PicMonkey’s FREE photo editing tools to monster-fy one of your photos, then share it on one or more of the social sites below, tagged with #PicMonkeyBOO (the hashtag let’s them find your entry, so don’t forget it!).

Twitter

Facebook

Pinterest

Instagram

Tumblr

Muzy

WeHeartIt

Flickr

Google Plus

The contest ends at 11:59pm PST on Tuesday, October 22th, 2013 so you definitely need to jump on this, but with PicMonkey’s simple tools, you can make your photos Halloween-tastic in about an hour or 2 (depending on your perfectionistic tendencies). Read the complete contest details here.

I’ve used PicMonkey’s free tools in the past to brighten up my iPhone pictures, add text and watermarks, make collages, change the style of a photo with lots of contrast, add helpful arrows, block out unwanted faces/bellies, etc. But with a paid Royale premium membership, you really get to kick your photos up a notch. In the Halloween themes, access to Royale features means you can use gashes and slashes, veins, extra scary eyes, the tooth decay tool, monster morph (which I used to create arched eyebrows), more realistic images of bats, lots of extra backgrounds, and more!

Royale membership opens up non-Halloween-themed tools too though. I especially liked playing with the wrinkle remover, eye brightener, mascara (so cool!), the better text fonts, sunglasses (hilarious), and the clone tool that I haven’t totally mastered yet but basically helps you remove or add things from your photos without it looking like you did so (so you don’t have to cover them up with stickers).

So now it’s time for the proof, my little vampire and zombie baby courtesy of PicMonkey’s awesome photo editing tools. Their zombie-loving Daddy is so proud …

But to prove my children really aren’t devil spawn (probably), here’s the before picture. ;)

Give PicMonkey a try, it’s easier than you think, you’ll have a ton of fun and I swear you’ll wonder how you ever lived without it. Good luck!!

Share:

Like this:

Even though there’s still snow on the ground (!!), my 3-year-old and I braved the weather and were still able to find some proof that spring really is coming. After we found the first plant, O ran around shouting “I’ll find more plants!” and did a great job with searching. I showed her leaf buds on a bush and on the tree branches. We even found some flowers that managed to push up from the frozen ground and had already bloomed. If anyone knows the names of the flowers I photographed, let me know.
It was interesting to notice the wide variety of plants popping out at the same time in the same area. We touched the leaves gently and smelled the flowers. We honked (and said I love you, haha) to some migratory geese. And at the end, climbing on a tree stump wasn’t really spring-y, but it sure was fun. This is definitely a tradition we’re going to do every year (although I really hope we’re in short sleeves next year).